Some of you may be noticing HTML in the daily outgoing messages. I apologise for that. You must have seen the various notices that appear at the top of each FreshPorts webpage. At present, they look like this:

A long time ago, I wrote code to extract this information and place it into the outgoing announcements. The table allows the end_date to be null, and the announcement would run forever. However, the code that extracts this data for announcements does not consider this:

This would copy the HTML into the plain text field, but I can amend those values manually through the web interface later. I initially thought I would just strip the HTML tags from the original text and use that as plain text. That won’t work. Yes, the tags can be stripped easily enough, but if you take the above examples, that would leave you with this:

Absolute BSD – $25 shipped – order yours now

I’m looking for work. I’m a software developer/sysadmin. Please read my resume and contact me if you have any leads. Thank you.

The candidates from the Design Contest are now available for review and voting.
Vote early. Vote often.

That’s not very useful. We’ll need different versions. I’ll need to add a URL manually. Such as this:

The candidates from the Design Contest [http://news.freshports.org/2007/01/30/freshports-design-contest/] are now available for review [http://www.freshports.org/DesignContestVoting/] and voting.
Vote early. Vote often.

As you can see, the plain text version needs to be distinctly different. That is why I added a new column.